Dale Duke

In 1992, shortly after Dale Duke and his wife of five years had separated, his seven-year-old step-daughter alleged that he had sexually molested her during spankings in their Dallas, Texas home.

In April, 1992, Duke, 42, was charged with aggravated sexual assault. In August, he entered a plea of no contest and was placed on probation for 10 years.

As a condition of the sentence, Duke was required to enter a sex offender treatment program. In 1997, when he refused to admit that he committed the assault, he was expelled from the program and brought back to court on a probation violation. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

In 1998, the victim recanted her accusation and an attorney was appointed to represent Duke and to examine the case. He filed a state petition for a writ of habeas corpus. Although the director of the Dallas Children’s Advocacy Center testified that the recantation was credible and that there was no medical evidence of molestation, Duke’s petition was rejected.

In 2006, Craig Watkins was elected District Attorney of Dallas County and instituted an open file policy on all cases. In 2010, Duke’s attorney requested the file and discovered that prosecutors had a statement from the victim’s maternal grandmother, who said that she believed the girl was lying and that the girl’s aunt had coerced her to make the allegation. The grandmother had died in 2006.

On November 4, 2011, the District Attorney’s Office filed a motion to vacate the conviction and dismiss the charges. Duke was freed from prison that day. Duke was awarded $1,146,666 in state compensation and a $7,500 monthly annuity.

About the Registry

The National Registry of Exonerations is a project of the Newkirk Center for Science & Society at University of California Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law. It was founded in 2012 in conjunction with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. The Registry provides detailed information about every known exoneration in the United States since 1989—cases in which a person was wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all the charges based on new evidence of innocence.

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